01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, September 30, 2004

FOXBORO -- It was a halftime feature during the Patriots-Colts game on the first night of the NFL season. Several coaches had been "miked" during a preseason practice, giving the viewers a certain insight into places the television cameras don't usually go. So there was the Giants' Tom Coughlin screaming at his team, his face flushed, coach as maniac. There were a couple of other high-energy guys looking as if they were auditioning for the role of coach in a remake of Any Given Sunday.

Then there was Bill Belichick.

He was standing in front of a few linemen, talking to one in particular.

"If you don't know what you're doing, I can't put you in there," he said.

Or something like that.

No yelling. No in the player's face. Nothing confrontational. Simply a coach telling a player that if he doesn't know what he's doing, there's no way he can be put into a game. Almost like some prep school history teacher telling a kid that if he doesn't pass the quiz he can't go home for the weekend.

Vintage Belichick.

And it's not without a certain irony.

It was only a few years ago that Belichick's style was seen as his greatest flaw. Remember? Remember when he was viewed as a public relations disaster in Cleveland, someone who fought with the media and seemed to have all the people skills of an IRS auditor? Remember when Belichick was perceived as the cerebral strategist, the guy in the backroom somewhere coming up with all the new schemes, not someone who had either the personality or the style to be a high-profile head coach in the NFL?

No more.

Now, that seems as obsolete as Drew Bledsoe in Foxboro.

Now Belichick has become the new template of what an NFL coach should be, the league's new designated coaching genius. Winning two of the last three Super Bowls will do that. So will coaching a team that's become the model for the contemporary professional sports team, one that's focused, dedicated, a group where the sum of the parts is greater than the individual pieces.

The fact Belichick is not the NFL coach of legend, charisma all but dripping off him? The fact Belichick is not a walking sound bite, one of those larger-than-life figures whose granite-jawed profiles seem to belong on some football version of Mount Rushmore, coach as icon?

No one cares anymore.

Which might say more about us than it does about Belichick.

We tend to like coaches who are tough, the ones who walk off the pages of adolescent fiction, coach as dictator. These are the coaches of romance, the ones that seem to hold a warm place in our collective memory. You know the type: Take charge. Get in players' faces. Run up San Juan Hill. Coach as absolute ruler. Bobby Knight. The Tuna. The memory of Bear Bryant and Woody Hayes. Coach as an American archetype.

No matter that it's a coaching style that's controversial, at best, maybe even counter-productive. No matter that it seems so outdated now, a relic from some musty past. No matter that very few coaches in professional sports go that route anymore. We still cling to the belief that this is what great coaching is.

Then there's Belichick.

The one who supposedly needed a charisma transplant.

There's no question Belichick learned from his stay in Cleveland that he needed to be more attuned to the media, that fighting with the media is a losing hand. One of the disclosures in the new Michael Holley book, Patriot Reign, is that Belichick prepares for every news conference. He goes in knowing what he wants to say, how he wants to spin a certain situation. Nothing is left to chance, as though Belichick has come to learn that dealing with the media is a big part of the job description of being an NFL head coach.

There's also no question that Belichick is viewed differently now. It no longer matters that his news conferences lack the kind of inherent theater that the Tuna's did. No longer matters that he's never going to say a lot, that there's always a moat around both his feelings and how he runs his football organization. No longer matters that once upon a time he seemed to be the antithesis of the popular perception of what a coach of legend was supposed to be.

Now, everyone wants a coach like Belichick, and if there's a certain irony to that, so be it.

Winning changes everything.

Or if you win two out of three Super Bowls you probably could spend the season in Hawaii and coach by e-mail and no one would complain. Belichick now gets every benefit of the doubt, has moved beyond second-guessing. Professional coaching is all about winning, and right now Belichick is the best there is.

Let everyone else have the style points.